Crossroads of diversity

Marian Scott, THE GAZETTE10.12.2013

Western countries have developed a variety of approaches to religious diversity, influenced by their own cultural traditions and history

People comemorate the murder of Dutch film director Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam at on November 2, 2010. Van Gogh was killed 6 years ago. The killer, Mohammed Bouyeri, a 26-year-old Dutch-Moroccan citizen, was apprehended by the police after being shot in the leg.MARCEL ANTONISSE
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A riot police officer stands guard while colleagues extinguish burning barricades on the main road in the heavily-immigrant populated neighborhood of Rosengaard of the southern Swedish city of Malmoe on December 19, 2008. Some 100 youths rioted in late December 18 for the second straight night, setting cars and garbage bins ablaze and throwing stones at police. Rioting started with the the recent closure of an Islamic cultural center.STIG-AKE JONSSON
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In 2010, Christine O’Donnell, a Tea Party Senate candidate in Delaware, challenged her Democratic opponent, Chris Coons, when he stated the U.S. Constitution calls for the separation of church and state.

“Let me just clarify: You’re telling me that the separation of church and state is found in the First Amendment?” she asked.

“Government shall make no establishment of religion,” Coons quoted.

“That’s in the First Amendment?” queried O’Donnell, who lost the election.

While some Americans still have trouble wrapping their minds around the idea, the precept that the state should not intervene in religious matters goes back to colonial times. Roger Williams, the dissident Puritan who founded Rhode Island, coined the phrase separation of church and state in 1644.

President Thomas Jefferson reaffirmed the principle, writing of the American constitution: “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;’ thus building a wall of eternal separation between Church and State.”

Government should stay out of religion unless it injures others, Jefferson said.

He wrote: “It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

But don’t Americans pledge allegiance to “one nation under God,” have “In God We Trust” on their money and politicians who end speeches with “God bless America”? Indeed, but those phrases are more recent traditions; “one nation under God” was only added to the pledge in 1954, at the height of anti-Communist hysteria.

The wall between church and state has come under attack from the religious right, for example, over the teaching of creationism in schools.

But separation between religion and politics lies at the core of American identity, said Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington D.C.

“Because religious freedom is such a deeply embedded value, we typically don’t have arguments,” he said.

“The United States was formed by people who were fleeing religious persecution, so this was both a means of protecting religion and keeping religion out of politics and public life,” he said.

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There are no moves to ban religious garb in the U.S., Papademetriou said.

In a 1995 Memorandum on Religious Expression in Schools, President Bill Clinton wrote: “Students may display religious messages on items of clothing to the same extent that they are permitted to display other comparable messages. Religious messages may not be singled out for suppression, but rather are subject to the same rules as generally apply to comparable messages. When wearing particular attire, such as yarmulkes and head scarves, during the school day is part of students’ religious practice, under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act schools generally may not prohibit the wearing of such items.”

In 2011, the U.S. Military began allowing students in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps to wear head scarves or turbans. The army banned turbans in 1984, but relented in 2010 to allow two Sikh officers to wear theirs.

>> Canada

MPI: 7.5 Strong

When Baltej Singh Dhillon became an RCMP cadet during the late 1980s, he was told to remove his turban. But Dhillon said to do so would violate his beliefs as a devout Sikh and asked to be exempted from the rule.

“I have been practising my religion for the last 23 years,” he said in a CBC-TV interview with the late Barbara Frum. “Now, is somebody really asking me to protect a tradition, or are they asking me to sacrifice my religion, my principles, my disciplines, my respect in the community, the respect I have from my family, and all the other things that tie into this religion?”

In 1990, Solicitor General Pierre Cadieux announced turbans would be allowed in the Mounties.

Dhillon’s victory was a milestone for religious accommodation in Canada, the first country in the world to adopt an official multiculturalism policy in 1971.

“For although there are two official languages, there is no official culture, nor does any ethnic group take precedence over any other. No citizen or group of citizens is other than Canadian, and all should be treated fairly,” Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau said.

“National unity if it is to mean anything in the deeply personal sense, must be founded on confidence in one’s own individual identity; out of this can grow respect for that of others and a willingness to share ideas, attitudes and assumptions,” he added.

Multiculturalism is enshrined in Section 27 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which states that the “Charter shall be interpreted in a manner consistent with the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians.”

In 1988, Parliament passed the Multiculturalism Act, with support from all parties.

Canada has the highest proportion of immigrants among the G8 countries, representing 20.6 per cent of the total population of 34.9 million.

While most Canadians support immigration, multiculturalism has been criticized for leading to ethnic enclaves and tolerating groups whose beliefs are inconsistent with liberal values. A poll in March by Forum Research showed 62 per cent of Canadians think immigrants should abandon their native cultural values when they conflict with Canadian values.

But Keith Banting, a professor of political studies who holds the Research Chair in Public Policy at Queen’s University, said many people have a mistaken perception of multiculturalism.

“It is a fear that multiculturalism means that people don’t have to integrate into the larger society. There is a fear that you get social segmentation and you weaken social cohesion if you adopt a multicultural strategy,” he said.

On the contrary, Banting said, multiculturalism is a two-way street that encourages newcomers to participate fully in Canadian society.

“We respect difference, we encourage people to celebrate their differences but we also encourage them to join the mainstream, join the economy, understand the country and accept basic liberal democratic values,” he said.

While religious symbols like the hijab and turban have generated controversy in Quebec, they are generally tolerated in the rest of Canada. In June, the Quebec Soccer Federation banned turbans on the pitch but reversed the stand after soccer’s world body, FIFA, said the players could wear the head coverings.

In 2007, Quebec soccer referees ejected an 11-year-old Ottawa girl from a tournament for wearing a hijab.

But while religious garb is tolerated, Ontario drew the line at Shariah law in 2005, when then-Premier Dalton McGuinty scuttled a plan to extend a 14-year-old law allowing for religious arbitration to Muslims.

In 2011, the federal government banned the wearing of the face-covering niqab and burka during Canadian citizenship ceremonies.

>> United Kingdom

MPI: 5.5 Moderate

Last month, Quebec Premier Marois suggested multiculturalism in the United Kingdom is leading to terrorism.

“In England, they beat each other up and set off bombs because of multiculturalism and people don’t recognize themselves any more in that society,” she said in an interview with Le Devoir.

“It really is nonsense,” responded Ted Cantle, the founder of the Institute of Community Cohesion at Coventry University.

Cantle, author of Interculturalism: The New Era of Cohesion and Diversity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) said the growth in Muslim extremism around the world is not peculiar to any one country.

Cantle noted that terrorists are a very small minority in all countries where they are present.

“What we’ve done in Britain is to try to make sure that we do not in any way alienate or make victims of the whole Muslim community,” he said.

“All of the talk about banning veils and so on tends to suggest that it’s the whole Muslim community that’s the problem, that we’ve got to be wary of them. In Britain, we’ve made strenuous efforts to say that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceable people,” he said.

The U.K. has made enormous strides in coming to terms with growing diversity since 1968, when Conservative MP Enoch Powell gave his “Rivers of Blood” speech warning the country was being overrun by Caribbean immigrants.

“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood,’ ” Powell said, warning that the U.K. was importing American-style racial strife.

Four out of five Britons are of British ethnic descent, down from 87.5 per cent in 2001, according to the 2011 census. The biggest minorities are people from India and Pakistan (4.5 per cent) and non-British whites (4.4 per cent).

The U.K. passed its first anti-discrimination law in 1965 and since 2001 has had a policy of “community cohesion” that encourages local initiatives like programs to improve school performance among minorities.

Cantle said there is no move in Britain to ban religious garb like the hijab, kippah or turban. Sikhs have been exempted from Britain’s motorcycle-helmet law since 1967.

“Generally speaking, the wearing of religious symbols is seen as desirable, not a problem,” Cantle said.

“In the same way, if an Indian lady turned up at an event, perhaps a family wedding, in a sari, or a Scottish man turned up wearing a kilt, it would be seen as something which is desirable. It’s about expressing their identity and their individuality and I think it would be welcomed,” he said.

However, the face-covering niqab has aroused controversy. A judge in London recently ruled a Muslim woman may stand trial wearing a full-face veil, but must remove it to give evidence. British Prime Minister David Cameron has said that while he disagrees with banning the niqab, officials should be able to ask women to remove it in certain situations.

In 2011, Cameron declared multiculturalism had failed.

Six years earlier, Trevor Phillips, chairman of the U.K.’s Commission for Racial Equality, warned in the wake of the 2005 bombings in London’s public transit system that Britons were “sleepwalking our way to segregation.”

But Cantle said on balance, the U.K.’s increasing diversity has been a success story.

A recent poll found 90 per cent of British voters feel Britain has become a multicultural country, and 70 per cent say that is a good thing.

“I think the effect of not banning religious symbols and allowing people to express them, as long as they are inoffensive, is that people feel a greater sense of belonging, they are more willing to integrate and, in the longer term, it clearly works in favour of the community as a whole,” he said.

>> France

MPI: 2 Weak

In last year’s presidential election, Socialist leader François Hollande painted himself as a unifying figure, in contrast to former president Nicolas Sarkozy, who vowed during the campaign to cut immigration by half and take halal meat off school cafeteria menus.

But Hollande’s popularity is sagging as high unemployment and anti-immigrant sentiments boost support for France’s far right.

This week, an Ifop poll in the newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur put the extreme-right Front National at 24 per cent of voters’ intentions, five points ahead of the third-place Socialists.

Front National leader Marine Le Pen wants to slash immigration, pull France out of the euro and reinstate border controls. Le Pen, who has compared the sight of Muslims praying in the street with the Nazi occupation of France, led the party to its best showing ever in last year’s election, with almost 18 per cent in the first round.

Her tough stance against immigration and globalization is paying political dividends in France, where majority-minority tensions remain high nine years after the government banned Muslim head scarves and other religious garb in public schools. Muslims are estimated at about five million out of a population of 65.7 million. (Under government policy France keeps no record on religious affiliation.)

French-style secularism, or laïcité, has roots in the French Revolution, which stripped the Catholic Church of the power and privileges it held under the Bourbon monarchy.

In 1905, the Statute Concerning the Separation of Churches and State made the state officially neutral on religion. However, it did not restrict the freedom of individuals to practice the religion of their choice.

L’affaire du foulard (the head scarf affair) burst into the headlines in September 1989, when three girls in Creil, north of Paris, were suspended from school for wearing the Islamic head scarf. Initially, the government’s Council of State ruled in favour of allowing the hijab, finding that “the freedom of conscience of students entails for them the right to express and manifest their religious beliefs.”

But in 1994, the education minister reversed that stand by instructing schools that “discreet” religious symbols were acceptable but not “ostentatious” ones.

In 2004, in the wake of a 2003 report by the Stasi Commission, the government banned “ostentatious” religious symbols like the hijab, Jewish kippah and Sikh turban in schools.

With the ban, France’s secularism law “shifted from a symbolism of liberty to a symbolism of prohibition” — a reinterpretation that “amounts to a new definition of secularism,” wrote Dominique Custos, a Paris-educated law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, in a 2006 article in the American Journal of Comparative Law.

In 2011, France banned the wearing of Islamic face veils in all public places.

In July, rioting erupted in Trappes, a Paris suburb, after police arrested a man who reacted aggressively when his wife was ticketed for wearing the niqab.

>> Sweden

MPI: 7 Strong

Rioting youths setting cars on fire is not the image that comes to mind when you think of Sweden.

The Scandinavian country that gave the world the pop group ABBA, Volvos and IKEA is also known for its excellent quality of life and generous social programs. Last week, an international report, the Global Age Watch Index, ranked Sweden the best country in the world in which to grow old.

But in May, riots erupted in Husby, a multi-ethnic Stockholm suburb, spreading to a half-dozen cities and towns. They were reportedly sparked by the death of an elderly man who was shot by police after he threatened officers with a machete.

The disturbances suggest some members of minority communities feel they are not sharing in the good life.

Even Sweden, where immigrants account for 14 per cent of the population of 9.5 million, is not immune to the cultural tensions roiling other European countries.

While the overall unemployment rate is only 7.3 per cent, youth unemployment is higher than the European average, at 22.8 per cent. Among young immigrants, joblessness is even higher.

Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt called for calm after the riots, saying unemployment and crime in Husby is actually on the decline.

The violence came as a surprise because Sweden is one of the most tolerant countries in the world when it comes to diversity.

But with many newcomers concentrated in low-income enclaves, social divisions are growing.

In 2010, the far-right Sweden Democrats entered Parliament for the first time after winning 5.7 per cent of the vote in a general election.

Banting of Queen’s University said one reason the economic performance of many immigrants to Sweden and other European countries is poor is that most arrive as refugees or under family-unification programs rather than being chosen as economic migrants, as in Canada.

“In Sweden, which has maintained a multicultural approach, the composition is overwhelmingly of refugees who are accepted for compassionate reasons and who have a lot of difficulty making it in a more technologically oriented labour force,” he said.

The government provides minority-language education in schools, including courses in Sami, the language of the indigenous people of northern Scandinavia, and funds organizations that work with immigrants and ethnic minorities.

Despite its Protestant heritage, Sweden is a very secular society, where only one person in 10 thinks religion is important in daily life.

However, religious minorities are encouraged to express their faith. Police officers are allowed to wear a turban, head scarf or kippah and in 2005, the military allowed a Sikh man to wear his turban.

In August, more than 2,000 Swedish women posted pictures of themselves on Facebook wearing the Muslim head scarf to express solidarity with a Muslim woman who said she had been attacked for wearing a hijab.

>> Netherlands

MPI: 2 Weak

In 2004, Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch Muslim, murdered Theo van Gogh, a filmmaker and great-grandson of Vincent van Gogh’s brother. The shocking slaying was a direct response to a TV movie called Submission, about the abuse of women under Islam, which van Gogh made with politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Van Gogh’s death was a catalyst for nationwide soul-searching that has led the Netherlands, the most densely populated country in Europe, to turn its back on multiculturalism. Known for their laissez-faire attitude on issues from euthanasia to prostitution, the Dutch found themselves asking how a society based on tolerance could be fostering religious fanaticism in its midst.

Last year, the Netherlands became the third European country, after France and Belgium, to ban face veils such as the niqab or burqa.

“The Netherlands is a country that did have (programs to promote multiculturalism) in the early stages and it’s clearly moved, withdrawing or uprooting a number of those programs,” Banting said.

Public opinion began to turn against growing diversity during the 1990s. After the Second World War, waves of immigration transformed the Netherlands from a fairly homogeneous society to a diverse one where nearly one in five people in a total population of 16.8 million are of non-Dutch ethnic origin. Minority communities include temporary workers from southern Europe, Turkey and Morocco who arrived during the 1960s and early 1970s and stayed, and refugees who have arrived since the late 1980s.

During the 1992 election campaign, politician Pim Fortuyn was assassinated after calling Islam “a backward culture” and proposing to close the border to Muslim immigrants.

In recent years, anti-immigrant sentiment and rising anger over the European Union’s austerity policies have boosted support for the far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) led by Geert Wilders. In 2011, Wilders, who has compared Islam with Nazism and wants to ban the Koran, was acquitted of inciting hatred against Muslims.

Wilders has begun talks with Le Pen’s far-right Front National in France and the Lega Nord in Italy with a view to forming an anti-EU bloc in coming European Parliament elections.

The Dutch government has tightened rules for permanent residents, drastically reducing the number of new citizens. Prospective residents must pass a test on Dutch language and values, and those from outside the European Union must take a civic integration test after they arrive.

In February, the government proposed to require all prospective residents to sign a “participation contract” agreeing to uphold Dutch values.

Yet in Amsterdam, multiculturalism is still very much a reality. A study by the New York-based Open Society Foundations’ At Home in Europe Project found that among Muslims, who make up 12 per cent of Amsterdam’s population, attachment to the city is high (80 per cent) compared with attachment to the Netherlands (60 per cent).

Only 41 per cent of Muslims interviewed for the project thought that other Dutch people considered them Dutch.

In Amsterdam, municipal initiatives like television spots featuring young Dutch Muslims promote pride in diversity.

Twelve per cent of the police force was from ethnic minorities in 2008 and the government has established a program to increase representation of minorities and women in the higher echelons.

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* The Multiculturalism Police Index or MPI

The Multiculturalism Policy Index is a scholarly research project by professors Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka at Queen's University that monitors multiculturalism policies in 21 Western democracies. Scores are for 2010 and are based on an evaluation of eight aspects of multiculturalism policies: legislative affirmation, school curriculum, media representation, exemptions from dress codes, allowing dual citizenship, funding of ethnic organizations, minority-language education and affirmative action. A rating between 6 and 8 is considered strong, 3 to 5.5 is modest and under 3 is weak.For more information, visit www.queensu.ca/mcp/index

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